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Yiyun Li reads her story, “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies,” from the March 17, 2025, issue of the magazine. Li is the author of eight books of fiction, including the novels “Must I Go” and “The Book of Goose,” and the story collection “Wednesday’s Child,” which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. A new nonfiction book, “Things in Nature Merely Grow,” will be published in May.

Ninaj Raoul has certain images seared in her mind from her trips to the United States’ Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Raoul, the co-founder and executive director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, a Brooklyn-based immigrant-advocacy group, served as an interpreter for Haitian asylum seekers who were imprisoned at Guantánamo in the early nineteen-nineties. During her many visits there, she recalls, the base was always scorching hot. There were no trees nearby, just rows and rows of tan and olive-green tents erected on cement and surrounded by airport hangars, porta-potties, barbed wire, and guard towers. Most of the tents had minimal airflow, and people were packed into them like sardines. Some of the detainees were being held with their children. Others had been separated from them. There was little privacy except what people achieved by hanging sheets between field cots. The camp was infested with mice, the air filled with flies, and the detainees would get soaked, even inside the tents, when it rained. Iguanas roamed inside the perimeter along with rodents known as banana rats that were the size of cats. I asked Raoul to share her memories recently in light of Donald Trump’s directive, on January 29th, ordering the expansion of the Migrant Operations Center in Guantánamo into a thirty-thousand-bed detention center. Scenes similar to the ones she describes were captured by photojournalists who visited the base at that time. Their work, a selection of which appears here, now seems like a preview of what’s to come.

Situated on the southeastern coast of the island of Cuba, Guantánamo was the site where U.S. troops first landed during the Spanish-American War, in 1898. The United States secured access to the base in 1903, through a postwar agreement that pressured the Cubans into leasing out some of their territory in exchange for independence. After a coup d’état in September, 1991, against Haiti’s first democratically elected President, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, tens of thousands fled on packed boats to escape a Haitian military; some of its leaders had been trained in the U.S. Haitians were detained at Guantánamo, along with Cubans who were also seeking asylum in the United States. Whereas the Cubans were considered to be fleeing political persecution, the Haitians were generally labelled as economic migrants, which made them less likely to be granted asylum expeditiously, if at all. To pass the time, detainees stared at the mountains in the distance and played soccer and dominoes. They sang and prayed and waited, sometimes for months.

“It was one of the loneliest places on earth,” Carl Juste, a Miami Herald photographer who travelled to Guantánamo twice in the nineteen-nineties, recently told me. “People felt as though they’d been dropped in the middle of nowhere. If not for the sea, you might think you were in the desert somewhere.” Trailed by military escorts, Juste and other photographers were allowed to document only approved scenes, but he and fellow-photojournalists circumvented that, he said, by focussing closely on details of the detainees’ experience: a child grasping a woman’s finger; hands interlaced over crestfallen faces, their expressions signalling tèt chaje—we’re in serious trouble.

Photograph from IMAGO Images / Reuters

Raoul vividly remembers an uncaptured moment in 1993 during a trip with a Yale law clinic led by students and their professors. She saw detainees sitting with hands and feet shackled in the hot sun in the middle of a field. Some of the military guards yelled at the team, and, when she tried to take a picture, one reached out and tried to grab her camera. She managed to capture a blurred image of his hand reaching toward the lens. The detainees, some of whom had qualified for asylum but were barred from entering the U.S. because they were H.I.V.-positive, had been holding up cardboard signs in protest and participating in a hunger strike. Some later told visiting journalists and human-rights observers, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson, that they were being treated like prisoners of war. Many of the detainees were thrown into the brig or underground prisons. Some women endured vaginal searches, and there were also reports of sexual assault. A Navy corpsman was court-martialled on allegations of rape. “It was a lawless place,” Raoul said. “There was no accountability.”

In “Forever Prison,” a segment of the PBS documentary series “Frontline” from 2017, a woman named Marie Genard, who was fourteen when she was detained at Guantánamo, along with her father, said, “We didn’t have no rights because technically we’re not in the U.S. So it felt like you were in prison. I mean, that’s what it was to us.”

Ira Kurzban, an immigration lawyer who was among the first to represent detainees on Guantánamo, said, in an oral history filmed for the Guantánamo Public Memory Project, that the base became a kind of gulag. “By saying, We do not want to keep people physically in our country, so let’s find a place where we can keep them out of sight,” he said, adding, “There was a great deal of human tragedy that was hidden from the American people.”

In 1993, Judge Sterling Johnson, Jr., from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, ordered the release of the Haitians detained in Guantánamo. Nearly a decade later, 9/11 terrorism suspects were jailed at Guantánamo, where they were subjected to “enhanced interrogations techniques” including waterboarding, a torture technique that Trump, when he was campaigning for President in 2016, promised to bring back—along with “a hell of a lot worse.”

Juste recalls global outrage prompted by a photograph from 2002—taken by a U.S. Navy photographer, Petty Officer First Class Shane T. McCoy, and released by the Defense Department—of caged, blindfolded, and shackled men on their knees in orange uniforms in a yard at Guantánamo and, later, the shocking images of prisoner abuse and torture taken by gleeful U.S. military personnel in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003.

“If this current Guantánamo project continues,” Juste said, “you have to hope that there will be people in there, perhaps whistle-blowers, who will tell or show what these people are going through—their actual experiences, not just what the government wants us to see.”

What the government appears to want to show, through videos and photographs distributed primarily through social media of home and workplace raids and arrests, is debasement and humiliation, casting undocumented immigrants, including women and children, as global villains in a “Cops”-like reality-show atmosphere. Government-friendly news outlets and television personalities such as Phil (Dr. Phil) McGraw help further spread the message by embedding with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who have been told to be camera-ready.

On February 4th, ten Venezuelan men, their hands and feet shackled, were brought to Guantánamo from El Paso, Texas, on a military plane. Photographed before their departure, they were described by officials with the Department of Homeland Security as “the worst of the worst” (language which had previously been used to describe 9/11 terrorism suspects), and as members of the Tren de Aragua gang, which the Trump Administration recently designated a terrorist group. One woman who identified her brother in the photographs, which were shared on social media, told the Times that he had only recently moved to the U.S. and was not a gang member. Over the following weeks, a hundred and a sixty-eight more detainees followed; all but one were later flown from Guantánamo to Venezuela. Fifty-one of the men had no criminal records. On February 24th, the Administration reportedly paused its plan to bring more detainees to Guantánamo because the tents that had been erected failed to meet “detention standards.” The plan is also facing several lawsuits backed by the A.C.L.U.

Soon after Trump signed his Guantánamo directive, he ended Temporary Protected Status for more than three hundred thousand Venezuelans and half a million Haitians, making them eligible for deportation in the coming months. The Administration is considering other detention sites in the U.S. and elsewhere, including in El Salvador, where, according to Human Rights Watch, even minors are subject to torture and abuse while incarcerated. In mid-February, a group of detainees including Iranian, Indian, Afghan, and Chinese immigrants were deported from the United States to Panama. They were confined to a hotel for several days. Most agreed to go back to their home countries, but more than a hundred expressed fear of returning and were moved to a preëxisting camp on the edge of the Darién Gap. A group of lawyers recently filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on their behalf and plans to file a complaint against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. On Friday, Panama announced it would release them, granting temporary passes to remain in the country for between thirty and ninety days.

Unlike the detainees at Guantánamo in the nineteen-nineties, a few today have access to phones and are able to sporadically communicate with reporters and photographers. Some of the men who were deported from Guantánamo to Venezuela have told a familiar tale of being beaten by guards, strip-searched, and put into solitary confinement, and of suicide attempts as well as hunger strikes to protest the inhumane conditions. As for the detainees by the Darién Gap, one Iranian held there, Artemis Ghasemzadeh, told the Times, “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages.” Unfortunately, as many of the old photos of Haitians in Guantánamo remind us, that’s exactly the point.

This week’s story, “Techniques and Idiosyncrasies,” takes place in a doctor’s office when the narrator, Lilian, is having her annual checkup. What drew you to this setting?

There is a distance between a patient and a doctor or a nurse—there is an innate imbalance—and yet the procedures and conversations are deeply personal, even intrusive. A doctor’s office is a petri-dish setting of a peculiar human interaction, but perhaps many relationships between strangers or partial strangers have this undercurrent of disturbance—for instance, later in the story, Lilian remembers being momentarily held as a psychological hostage by a limousine driver. It’s a setting where one is quite alone, while another person’s presence both accentuates and threatens that aloneness.

There’s a new nurse, a woman named Tina. In seemingly minor ways, Tina makes the interaction between patient and nurse seem more charged than it would usually be. Do you want the reader to question whether that’s intentional on Tina’s part or completely by happenstance?

Yes, I would like the reader to question the intention, or lack of intention, behind Tina’s behavior because Lilian, trapped in a situation she can neither define nor articulate, feels uncertain. I suppose fiction is often about the effect a character has on other characters. Some characters, like Tina, make other characters sense something unusual and simultaneously doubt their interpretations—such characters often bring an interesting air of disquiet to a story.

Lilian was also the protagonist of your previous story in the magazine, “The Particles of Order,” which was set in a bed-and-breakfast in the West of England. In that story, we gradually learned that she had lost her two sons to suicide. The trip seemed to be an escape, perhaps, from the day-to-day reality of her life in America. Here, she’s back in her life. Does that give the story a different tenor?

When life is beset by extremities, an unfamiliar setting brings an illusion of reprieve, so in the previous story the trip to England is welcomed by Lilian as a geographical distraction. There is something stark with this story now that she returns to face her reality. I blurted out when I saw you a few weeks ago that the story was “unkind,” but I think that might not be the right description. Rather, it’s a story with little space for illusion. Lilian quotes Elizabeth Bowen’s words—“using both eyes at the same time”—which is what Lilian seems to be doing in the story: looking at everything with both eyes.

Lilian recalls an earlier visit to the doctor’s office, when she’d told the doctor about the death of her second son. She realizes that it was the first time she’d had to break the news to someone directly. How much is the story about the act of revealing and how much is it about the act of withholding?

Lilian is a writer and is acutely aware of the limitations and flaws of narratives, which navigate between revealing and withholding. At one point, Lilian thinks: “Some writers rely on their techniques; some, their idiosyncrasies. All the same, there is consistency in each writer’s touch. . . . Life, inconsistent, with little technique but with unpredictable idiosyncrasy, is always a superior storyteller.” But because we are all inferior writers compared to life, any storytelling, I suppose, is still upheld by the techniques of withholding and revealing.

She also thinks back to her childhood in Beijing, and, remembering the reaction to an incident when her jacket was slashed by a stranger on a bus, considers our fear of the unfathomable, and our tendency to believe that if something terrible happens someone must have erred in the first place. What does she think of that urge to cast blame or assign responsibility?

Did Lilian share that tendency before? It could not be ruled out, but her experience has carried her beyond the possibility of that belief, which is, in truth, an illusion. In the story, she ponders: “The unfathomable is unsettling, and that makes the most banal thought a shelter. Those who don’t think of themselves as monsters feel less uneasy if catastrophes can be explained as consequences.”

What role does the hedgehog, the pet of childhood friends of Lilian’s, play in the story?

This is a good place to state that Lilian is not me. Though she shares some of my experiences, thoughts, and feelings, she is fictional. Sometimes a writer wants to give a real and peculiar experience to her character. I’ve carried the memory of that coughing hedgehog from my childhood, and I’ve spent a disproportional time thinking about it, which seems to fit into the story well: the hedgehog had a matter-of-fact life and a matter-of-fact death, but it is an inexplicable being that never ceases to exist.

Lilian considers the fact that strangers have always thought her to be a good listener, and as a result unburdened themselves to her. She doubts whether she has any interest in those strangers anymore as characters. Do you think the story proves her right or wrong?

Ah, yes, Lilian claims not to have any interest in the strangers but what wishful thinking that is! She may have refrained from asking Tina questions that lead to more revelations, but she cannot stop paying attention to Tina or other strangers.

In May, you are publishing a new memoir, “Things in Nature Merely Grow”—“the book for James,” as you call it—which describes the period immediately after the death of your younger son. (An excerpt will appear in the magazine in a future issue.) You wrote an earlier book, “Where Reasons End,” after the death of your older son, Vincent. How important has writing been to you in these harrowing periods of your life. Does it bring you closer to your sons?

It may be good to quote a stanza from Wallace Stevens, which I used as an epigraph for the book for James (and it was sent to me at the right moment by Deborah Treisman [The New Yorker’s fiction editor] last year when I was feeling momentarily uncertain about writing): “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself; / And there I found myself more truly and more strange.” I have sometimes heard writers say how difficult writing is, but living, I think, is far more difficult than writing. I believe in the practice of doing the things that work, which for me include writing, among other activities. My words won’t bring the boys back so they will always be farther from me than when they were alive, but I suppose this is what I do as their mother, making space for them in my writing when that space is no more in life. ♦

Lilian was the only patient that morning. This was a change from the crowded waiting room she was used to in the days before Dr. Fenton began to charge an annual fee. “Concierge medicine” sounded like “bespoke chocolates” and would not have been Lilian’s natural inclination, and yet she stayed with the clinic. Looking for a new physician would require making calls, meeting strangers, and filling out medical-history forms, and that, even for a healthy fifty-one-year-old, could be complicated. Lilian might be able to omit the two miscarriages—not all experiences, thank goodness, left a trace—but could she also omit the two childbirths, the second by C-section? Small talk happened in doctors’ offices, sometimes about children.

A fee was a manageable price for not having to lie or explain. Lilian did not mind telling the truth, but truths could be startling and leave people uneasy—spooked, Lilian called that state.

The nurse, who introduced herself as Tina, was new. So, Eileen must have retired. For a few years, Eileen had been talking about travelling to County Clare, where her grandparents had lived before emigrating. That retirement plan had been a recurring subject, and Lilian welcomed the images of the coastal cliffs, the castle ruins, and the country lanes, a whiff of wild and poetic bleakness in the fluorescent-lit examination room. She wondered if Eileen talked about visiting her grandparents’ village with every patient. Lilian had been to Ireland many times but not to County Clare. Eileen had never been to Ireland.

Tina, between fifty and sixty, was not the chatty type. She seemed to have an unusual way of looking at Lilian, which reminded her of the way Elizabeth Bowen had described a secret agent in one of her novels—“using both eyes at the same time.” The association was perhaps unfair. Why shouldn’t Tina look with both eyes fixed harshly on Lilian’s face—the nurse was not a Cyclops or afflicted with exotropia.

Lilian’s right arm failed to provide any blood. Tina sighed. “Nope,” she said. “Nothing.”

“Huh, I drank plenty of water this morning,” Lilian said, a pointless statement because the outcome was the only thing that mattered in this circumstance.

“Not enough,” Tina said, and switched to Lilian’s left arm, which proved a success.

The veins in both her arms used to be coöperative for Eileen. Lilian was about to say something—like how odd that an arm could wake up one morning and decide to misbehave—but Tina held up a finger. “Listen. You can hear it if you stay quiet.”

It?

“The blood flow,” Tina said, nodding at the tube in her hand.

Lilian held her breath, and, in the stillness, made a mental list detailing the nurse’s appearance and movements. Her fingernails were painted lavender; her hair, shoulder length, thick, was dyed ink-dark; her green eyeshadow and pink blush seemed only to accentuate her angular face and hard stare. She favored her left hand, capping and uncapping tubes with it. There was a mole on the back of her right hand. Lilian had not taken such an inventory with Eileen, whose face had begun to fade from her memory, but Eileen had never asked her to listen to her own blood filling the test tubes. No nurse had done that.

Perhaps Tina had a propensity to seek unusual and aesthetic satisfaction from her work, Lilian thought, experimenting with generosity, but it was a cold generosity, assured by her sense that she herself possessed the ease of a chameleon: she could meet Eileen’s small talk with warmth and effusiveness, and she could also match Tina’s unsmiling stillness with her own stark impassiveness. She wondered if Tina asked all her patients to listen to their blood. It seemed unlikely. Someone would have complained, concierge medicine or not.

They sat through six large tubes’ and three small tubes’ worth of silence. Only once did Lilian catch what she thought might be the sound of her blood flowing. If asked to describe it, she would not have had any way to do it. Lilian was a writer, but words were limited. Once, at a zoo, she and her children had been invited to stroke a boa constrictor. Lilian, with a phobia of reptiles, nevertheless gathered the courage for her children’s sake, running a finger along the back of the boa constrictor. The sensation, unlike touching any other living creature or inanimate object, could not be described. Some experiences are exclusive, known only to those who seek or are afflicted by them.

Tina untied the tourniquet on Lilian’s arm and left with the tray of tubes. At that moment, two thoughts occurred to Lilian: she would be able to give a good witness’s description of Tina if they were characters in a detective story; and Tina, memorable in her appearance and her demeanor, would never be the murderer in a novel, only a decoy.

In real life, the probability of a nurse being a murderer in disguise, though not zero, was low, and Lilian did not believe that such a sensational turn was likely to occur to her. She had simply been reading too many mysteries recently, and those books tended to instill extra meaning in the commonplace. It was like the sky in a painting, which was often the first thing Lilian noticed and studied when she was in a museum. That must be what the painters wanted, their individual skies rendered unique by their perceptions and techniques. Lilian did not pay equal attention to the actual sky, which served as a background for other things she scrutinized: witch hazel in February, weeping cherry in May, autumn foliage, and icicles in the coldest days of the year. She was wary of giving the sky, which was vast and lofty for everyone, any metaphorical or transcendental weight, as Tolstoy was wont to do.

Lilian had begun to see Dr. Fenton seven years ago, three months after the death of her older son, Oscar. Dr. Fenton had dealt with that information professionally at their first meeting. She had asked about Lilian’s mood, and Lilian had replied with a joke about the ratio of her being vertical versus horizontal. Joking was her version of uncontrollable tears, but Dr. Fenton neither laughed nor pressed to see what was behind Lilian’s inane laughter. Instead, she wrote down the contact information for Lilian’s psychiatrist and therapist and turned her attention to Lilian’s body, which offered, Lilian supposed, the solace of the concrete: minor problems could be managed; anything major would be referred to specialists.

But, when a second death beset Lilian’s life, Dr. Fenton’s reaction took her by surprise. It was four weeks after Jude’s death, and Lilian had gone to the clinic because of a small gardening mishap. A rose thorn had pricked the back of her ring finger and caused an exceedingly painful but local infection.

Dr. Fenton explained that where the prick was, between two joints, was an enclosed space, like a small petri dish. Like an Eppendorf tube, Lilian said. It’s an occupational hazard for writers to always want to revise and edit; she could not help but offer an alternative simile. Dr. Fenton glanced at Lilian and said yes, exactly, and within that space the bacteria’s proliferation could cause acute pain, but it was a problem that was easy to solve with antibiotics. As Dr. Fenton washed her hands at the sink, ready to finish the visit, she asked about Lilian’s general health. Lilian hesitated and said there was something else that Dr. Fenton might want to know, which had nothing to do with the infection and was not the reason for the appointment.

This time, Lilian did not attempt any joke. She related the news in the simplest manner: like his brother, Jude had died by suicide. Dr. Fenton looked so stricken that Lilian, for fear that Dr. Fenton might faint, held her elbow and guided her to a chair. It was the first and the only time that Lilian had witnessed another person’s reaction to Jude’s death. Apart from two close friends, people had received the news by e-mail or by text or by phone call—not from Lilian and never in person. Dr. Fenton’s tears made Lilian feel that she had performed an unfair trick. She should have e-mailed the news before she arrived at the clinic with a pricked finger like a princess in a fairy tale.

Lilian had chosen Dr. Fenton because she had an unfussy, pragmatic way of looking at life. “My job”—she had often said at Lilian’s checkups—“is to keep you healthy for as long as possible. And then, when the time comes, hopefully, you’ll go out fast, no prolonged illness, minimal suffering.” The first time Dr. Fenton had said that, she had drawn a steady line in the air with her pen and then dropped it suddenly. Lilian laughed, but Dr. Fenton remained stern, only nodding at Lilian’s understanding.

When Dr. Fenton recovered from her tears, she asked Lilian how she was doing. Lilian, aware of both her hands now being held by Dr. Fenton, who was neither stern nor matter-of-fact in that moment, replied with what she had carefully formulated as an answer to people’s queries, making a distinction that only some would notice: “My life is never going to be all right again, but I’m doing all right.”

“But why . . . did he . . . do you know?”

Most people did not have the opportunity to blurt out that “why” question to Lilian, even though it must have been among the first questions that occurred to anyone. “I don’t think ‘why’ is the question for me to ask,” she said. “I accept Jude’s decision.”

“You must be a saint!”

It was an inexplicable exclamation, one that Lilian would later wonder about. What kind of saint, in what religion or tradition? Lilian was not a saint—just considering the idea made her feel ten times bleaker about her life than she did already. Nor was she a cold-blooded monster, though she knew that some people considered her precisely that. Why else would two children from the same family choose suicide? The unfathomable is unsettling, and that makes the most banal thought a shelter. Those who don’t think of themselves as monsters feel less uneasy if catastrophes can be explained as consequences. “I suppose it’s only natural for people to come to that conclusion,” Lilian had mused a couple of times with her therapist, and once, at a literary banquet in London, with an acquaintance.

The previous time Lilian had seen Imelda, who was sitting next to her in London, was ten years earlier, when her children were alive, but with some people mindless small talk would be an insult. Imelda pondered. “If you look around, it may be safe to say that most of the people here have not experienced the same level of difficulty as you have,” she said, gesturing to the well-dressed guests relishing the dinner and their conversations. “So, I’m afraid an average person might think, My gosh, those parents must be monsters.”

Lilian found that reply comforting. The world could not be made darker or rosier for her by the tinted glasses others chose for themselves. She would rather talk with a person who was capable of seeing the world as it was, hence capable of seeing her as who she was. “Sometimes I think about Ivy Compton-Burnett,” Lilian said, knowing that Imelda would understand the reference. Ivy’s two youngest sisters died in a suicide pact on Christmas Day of 1917, and they were not even the only children in that family to meet the fate of untimely death.

“A hundred years ago, the death of young people was a more common experience,” Imelda said. “But that thought doesn’t help you.”

“No,” Lilian agreed.

“I hope you don’t feel you need to beat yourself up for what happened.”

“Oh, I don’t beat myself up,” Lilian said. “Life has done that already.”

Tina came back to administer more tests. Though not a talkative woman, she had a range of ways of conveying her judgments: a heavy sigh, a quick gasp, or an emphatic shaking of her head. Thus Lilian learned that she did not ace the depth-perception test for both eyes, and her hand grip was suboptimal, which—as Tina refreshed Lilian’s memory, though she needed no such reminder—was an important measurement because of its correlation with the onset of dementia.

“Let’s leave before the lights come on.”

Cartoon by Elisabeth McNair

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Just as Lilian settled into a chair for her auditory test, Tina paused and pointed to Lilian’s puffer jacket on a hanger. “Look,” Tina said. There was a tear on the back, about half an inch. Some downy fluff was about to leak out.

“Oh,” Lilian said, keeping her face and voice flat. She felt a convulsion, not because of this jacket but because of the one she had worn at twelve. That year, she had begun to commute to middle school, navigating the crowded buses in Beijing, an hour in the early morning and an hour in the evening. Public transportation in a metropolis was a reliable way to hasten the end of childhood. On those buses, a girl learned to watch out for the trespassing body parts of men, a hand probing purposefully, a leg pressing ignobly, but it was on a winter evening that the malice of the world was crystallized for Lilian. A stranger razored the back of her puffer jacket, crisscrossing lines that she did not feel. After she got off the bus, feathers started to escape behind her, swept up by the wind and turned golden orange by a nearby street lamp. A passerby exclaimed, and a circle of people formed around Lilian: worse than being beset by a disaster was to have it assessed by strangers. More than one person expressed disapproval of Lilian’s carelessness; someone wondered aloud about the financial burden she would cause her parents—a puffer jacket, in 1985, was a considerable expense. An acquaintance, who happened to have been passing, questioned the cost of unnecessary ambition. Lilian, the woman said, could have done just fine going to the middle school nearby instead of commuting a long distance to an élite school. Seen from decades later, that moment took on the fantastical air of a fairy tale, but it was one about Bluebeard rather than the Goose Girl, served up as a cautionary tale, not a happily-ever-after. What was the moral of the story? Years later, Lilian understood people’s fear of the incomprehensible: when something terrible happens to someone, surely that person must have erred in the first place. How else can people find security and reassurance in this senseless world?

Tina, as though offended by Lilian’s nonchalance, clicked her tongue and retrieved a Band-Aid from a drawer. “If you’ll allow me,” she said, and, before Lilian agreed, she placed the Band-Aid over the tear.

Lilian watched the lavender fingernails as Tina smoothed the Band-Aid, and remembered a quintessential Patricia Highsmith scene—or perhaps Lilian had only imagined it, for later she could not recall from which of the Tom Ripley books she had retained this memory: Tom, moving the body of a man he has just murdered into some woods, accidentally breaks off a branch of a young tree; while the body burns, Tom caresses the wounded tree, full of tender apology.

A puffer jacket does not sense its mutilation. A tree does not mourn a severed branch. Blood flowing into test tubes does not hanker for an audience. A rose thorn does not harbor any ill will, only blind stubbornness. If one were to tally the things and the people in life, Lilian thought, one would be bound to conclude that much of the world is unfeeling: incapable of feeling or unwilling to feel, though what difference does it make? And, in so many ways, an unfeeling world may be less horrendous than a world in which feelings, too narrow or too strong or too timid or too distorted, dictate life.

A pair of twins from the past often returned to Lilian’s memory. In first grade, Lilian had befriended the girls. Their family, unlike the families of most of Lilian’s schoolmates, lived not in an apartment building with central heating and running water but in a one-room cottage, which was no more than a shack. The windows were open squares pasted over with layers of newspaper, and the room was occupied mainly by a brick bed large enough for the parents and the four children to share. The twins, inexplicably to Lilian even then, kept a hedgehog as a pet, and once—only once—Lilian was invited to visit the hedgehog after school. The girls’ older brothers were out, and their parents were at work. The room, with neither enough natural light from the newsprint-covered windows nor a lamp lit, reminded Lilian of the word “medieval,” which she’d just learned, though she knew not to share this with her friends. The twins, in fact, were considered backward at school. They could not read and often failed the hygiene check on Mondays: their fingernails were dark, the skin on the backs of their necks and behind their ears looked sooty, and they could never produce a clean handkerchief from their pockets.

The hedgehog was retrieved from a cardboard box where it lived. (Why did it never think of climbing out of the box and running away when no one was home? Lilian would wonder after the visit.) The creature, with its small eyes, a pink, sniffling nose, and gray spikes that did not hurt but only tickled, did not have a name. Unlike a cat, it could not chase a piece of yarn, but it could do the neatest trick, which the twins were eager to show Lilian. One of them placed a pinch of salt in her palm. The hedgehog licked it up and then started to cough, an eerily human sound, as if an old man were coughing. Lilian, startled, looked around at the door, and that made the sisters laugh: Lilian, too, was tricked, just like the hedgehog.

Lilian felt obliged to laugh with the girls. Was that a form of small talk for children, when feelings that were too intense could be covered up more easily than articulated? Was that the beginning of Lilian’s habit of telling jokes instead of shedding tears?

A few weeks after that, the girls and their mother died of carbon-monoxide poisoning on a cold night. The father and the two boys survived. Nobody said anything about the hedgehog, and, long after Lilian had forgotten the girls’ faces and their names, she thought about the hedgehog. Lilian could be considered a sensitive child because the memory of the coughing hedgehog agonized her, and yet she was unfeeling, too, for she had not mourned her friends. Perhaps it is futility—more than pain, more than humiliation, more than death—that haunts one. Short of stealing the hedgehog from the girls, Lilian could do nothing to stop them from obtaining heartless pleasure from its helplessness, just as the world did nothing to save the girls or many other children. Perhaps Lilian should have told Imelda that it was not that children’s deaths were becoming less commonplace. Rather, the world was becoming more resourceful with its distractions: futility is easier to banish than death.

Once the auditory test got under way, Tina, for the first time, was approving. “My God, your hearing is good,” she said, looking straight into Lilian’s eyes as though challenging her to disagree. But she might be imagining these things by paying too close attention, Lilian thought, in the same way that Tolstoy gave meaning to the lofty sky of Austerlitz, or the painters of the past immortalized the sky as they had seen it.

Lilian made a noncommittal sound. She had not minded Eileen’s small talk, because it had required neither feeling nor attention from her. Tina demanded extra exertion from Lilian—it took an effort to look intentionally obtuse. Pretending can be a different form of understanding, or of withholding understanding.

About fifteen years ago, Lilian had travelled to upstate New York. Nabokov country, as she used to think of it, though on a recent trip she realized that it would be more fit to be called MAGA country. The literary organization that had invited her for the earlier trip had arranged a car service between the airport and the town, a two-hour ride. The man who came to pick Lilian up introduced himself as Noah.

It was neither the first time nor the last that Lilian had been a captive audience. People who knew her little tended to see in her a sympathetic listener, taking her quietness as attentiveness, viewing her questions—asked only to deflect people’s questions about her—as an invitation. Once, at a fund-raising party in San Francisco, a woman approached Lilian with a wistful look. “If my mother had had your career, she would not have killed herself” was the opening line, and Lilian felt obliged to stay for a long narrative and offer the appropriate response. Another time, someone else’s graduate advisee kept Lilian in her office for three-quarters of an hour with a monologue, during which Lilian did not say a single word. Afterward, the young man exclaimed, “You’re wonderful. Perhaps I should add a wise Japanese woman as a character to my novel!” For about two years, a hairdresser—an immigrant in New York who also had a master’s degree in theology from his homeland—talked at length about religion, philosophy, and his struggles with faith as he cut Lilian’s hair.

It’s astonishing, Lilian often thought, that people feel this urge to talk about themselves with a stranger, however much or little they have lived. But few people would look at their own lives and think they have had only a meagre portion of experience; they must feel that they have experienced more life than they know what to do with—why else would they insist on telling Lilian their stories? Only someone like Ivy Compton-Burnett would say, after the deaths of those young siblings, whom she had raised, “I have had such an uneventful life that there is little information to give.”

People are sometimes presumptuous, at other times predictable, but often they are both. Yet, even as Lilian bemoaned this to a friend, she knew she was partially responsible for repeatedly putting herself into these situations. Was she too passive, too polite, too sympathetic, too kind—was that what made people feel the ease of telling her about themselves? Was she too curious to resist a story—any story, good or bad or mediocre? Or was she, ultimately, too indifferent to her own dilemma of being held hostage by other people’s wishes and miscomprehensions?

The journey in Nabokov country could have been one of those familiar incidents. In her travels, Lilian had unintentionally collected many drivers’ stories: of a man from an Irish family in Boston who had escaped what he called his “Catholic guilt” by running west, all the way to the Pacific; of a Puerto Rican whose aspiration to become a champion jockey had been dashed by his weight gain during puberty; of a Pennsylvania grandfather whose tales about the talents and quirks of every single grandchild—seven of them—had made Lilian drowsy; of the hard luck and good dreams of many strangers. Lilian wondered if those men repeated their stories to all their passengers.

Noah, encouraged by the occasional and polite response from Lilian, talked, unsurprisingly, non-stop: about his previous position, as a school district’s superintendent; about his inheriting a fleet of vehicles two years earlier, when his father retired from his limousine firm; about the village in Central Europe from which his great-great-grandfather had emigrated, and the family get-together every other year, alternating between the village in the Old World and the town in upstate New York, where the latest reunion included two hundred and fifty family members, from both countries; about his three children, the youngest in high school, the two older ones in college; about his favorite grocery store, Wegmans, and his favorite purchase from the store, organic roast chicken. This tireless need for people to narrate their lives, Lilian thought, half listening, half sunk in amused despair.

Then Noah changed his subject. He asked Lilian if she had heard of the famous case of a local teen-age girl being abducted and chained in the basement of a farmhouse for seven years by a man. “The reason I want to tell you the story is that we’ll pass that part soon,” Noah said. “I can take a detour to show you the house.”

Lilian said there was no need, and Noah insisted that it was not inconvenient. Only two minutes off the road, and he would make sure to step on the gas so that Lilian would get to her hotel without any delay. Already, the air in the car seemed to take on a different quality. Lilian, keeping her face vacant, pretended that she did not see Noah’s eyes studying her in the rearview mirror as he went on to recount, with lurid relish, the girl’s abduction, her years in the dungeon, and, eventually, her escape.

Noah was not the man who had committed the atrocity, but how much better was he than the criminal, whose feat he must have admired, somehow, when he swerved off the local highway to a country road and then onto an unpaved dirt road? The farmhouse, unoccupied for some years according to Noah, stood in early-spring drabness, its white paint peeling, its dark windows staring blankly. Noah left the car idling and pointed out a path behind the house which led to a neighboring farm. When the girl had found the opportunity to escape, she had run on that path barefoot and naked, Noah said, describing the scene as though on that day he had been sitting in an idling car in the same spot, watching.

Perhaps Noah was no different than Patricia Highsmith, who had not murdered and yet must have found a thrill in watching her characters murder others. Was it a crime that Noah turned himself into a compulsive narrator, fondling details of gruesomeness because he was safe, free, and invincible, and because there was nothing Lilian could do but sit with him, listening?

Lilian, then and later, wondered if she had done the right thing by maintaining an inscrutable look when the car stopped at the farmhouse. After they got back onto the highway, she closed her eyes, pretending to have dozed off. Noah’s motive—timid in one sense and outrageous in another—was transparent, but there was no point in letting him know that she had seen through him. Her understanding was precisely what he hankered after: he wanted her imagination to be framed by his imagination; he wanted her undivided attention and intense feelings.

When they reached the hotel, Noah helped to unload Lilian’s suitcase and wished her a good visit. Until then, Lilian had not known how the drive would end. In fiction, there would have been many alternatives between the farmhouse and the hotel. Patricia Highsmith would have taken the story in one direction; Elizabeth Bowen, another; Ivy Compton-Burnett, yet another. But Lilian knew that there was nothing she could do but wait and see. In fiction, one can maneuver the time line to accentuate a drama or to defuse a crisis, but, in life, Lilian knew, then and later, the falsity of such maneuvers: there was nothing a mother could do when a child died or when a second child died; she could only wait for each day to arrive and then discover the meaning of that day.

Some writers rely on their techniques; some, their idiosyncrasies. All the same, there is consistency in each writer’s touch, Highsmith being Highsmith, Bowen being Bowen. Life, inconsistent, with little technique but with unpredictable idiosyncrasy, is always a superior storyteller.

When Tina came back into the room, Lilian was lying on the examination table, naked but for her underpants and a robe held closed by her hands, since she had been warned by Tina not to tie the belt. Tina wired the EKG machine and put cuffs around Lilian’s ankles for an ABI test, asking not once but twice whether Lilian had put any lotion on her body that morning.

Lilian shut her eyes. In a murder mystery, Tina could have injected something into Lilian, or she could simply have knocked Lilian out with blunt force, but life was not fiction. Whatever was going on behind Tina’s discontent that morning, or whatever had happened in Noah’s imagination, was only a small fragment in a vast reality. They were unlikely to rewrite an ordinary life. Few people could. Few people would.

When the tests were over, Tina disconnected the electrodes from Lilian’s body, taking care not to rip off the tape too abruptly. Lilian, her eyes still closed, nodded when Tina said that her heart looked fine. Then the room became quiet, as though Tina had left without Lilian’s noticing. She opened her eyes. Tina was standing right next to the table, looking down with both her eyes fixed on Lilian’s face. “Do you have children?” Tina asked.

Later, Lilian would call a friend whose father was a doctor to confirm that the question was unusual or at least unprofessional. Later, Lilian would wonder if in her file Dr. Fenton had notes about the deaths of Oscar and Jude, which Tina had seen, and if Tina felt compelled to ask the question because how Lilian chose to answer it would mean something. This, of course, was a conjecture; for once, Lilian was not interested in knowing the truth.

But at that moment, looking up from the examination table at Tina, her dark hair framing her unsmiling face, Lilian neither hesitated nor flinched. “No,” she said.

Tina nodded. “Neither do I.”

The unmistakable sadness in that statement took Lilian by surprise. Did Tina mean that it was too bad that Lilian, like Tina, had missed something essential in a woman’s life? Or perhaps Tina had expected Lilian to say, “I had two sons, and they died”—to which Tina could have responded with a revelation of her own: “The same happened to me. I’ve lost my children, too.”

Lilian would never know what was behind Tina’s sadness. After she left and Dr. Fenton came into the examination room, Lilian did not mention anything unusual to the doctor, just as, years before, she had not complained to the literary organization about Noah. Noah and Tina would stay in her memory, just as the twin sisters had, but they would do little to haunt Lilian, unlike the hedgehog’s coughing, unlike the feathers flying from her back, and unlike the lives and the deaths of her children. Had Oscar and Jude been alive, Lilian might have felt differently toward Tina. She might have asked questions, which might have led to stories. She might have even made up a story with a deeper complexity, featuring a villain named Noah. But her attention was limited, and her feelings were more exclusive these days. She did not seek to understand Tina or Noah, for understanding was not their due. ♦

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The first time I met Stephen Kotkin, I was a young Moscow correspondent covering the Gorbachev-Yeltsin era for the Washington Post. Steve was an energetic young professor of history at Princeton, who was studying what he called “Stalinist civilization.” Unlike some professors in the field, he was not a constant presence on television, unloading opinions on demand; his sources of information ranged beyond the usual, and he preferred to retain a measure of discretion for the sake of his real work. Kotkin certainly knew many dissidents and prominent Communist Party apparatchiks, editors, and security officials, but he also cultivated connections in the nascent world of Russian business and elsewhere. Early in his career, his canvas was the steel city of Magnitogorsk, in the Urals, where so much of Stalin’s war machine was built. In recent years, he has been at work on a three-volume biography of Stalin; he is working now to complete the final installment of that masterly work.

Kotkin is a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a scholar of prodigious research and linguistic facility. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago, we have had a series of conversations for The New Yorker Radio Hour. Our latest discussion came just a few days after Donald Trump and J. D. Vance’s tag-team assault on the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You are hardly a fan of Donald Trump, but your tendency has been to try to look past, or around, his performances, which you’ve compared to professional wrestling. When it comes to Ukraine and American policy, though, what’s behind the performance? What do you think Trump actually wants in Ukraine? Or is that too hard to discern?

Trump is of the opinion that America has been on the wrong side of a lot of deals, not just the Ukrainian deal, and that a rebalancing is necessary. Now, Trump’s style is very off-putting—some would say disgraceful. Trump behaves in ways that diminish American soft power, which is a hugely important dimension of American power. In his mind, the means don’t matter as long as you get to the ends, which is a massive rebalancing of U.S. relationships across the world.

Let’s remember: once upon a time, the left had a view of Russia, which was that Stalin—yes, Stalin—was forging a new world, a new world of abundance and social justice and peace, that the Soviet Union was the future. The left was all in—not the entire left, but a really big part of it—on this fantasy of the Soviet Union as the future, while everybody was either starving or being murdered, as you know.

Now we have a fantasy Russia on the right: that Russia is about traditional values, that Russia is defending Western civilization, that Russia is the future, that Russia is our friend. And this fantasy is complete rubbish, if we can use a technical term. We went from a fantasy on the left to a fantasy on the right about Russia. I don’t share either fantasy. They’re not equivalent fantasies, certainly, but they’re nasty regimes in the Stalin case on a world-historical scale, and less so, but nasty, in Putin’s case. I don’t like these fantasies, but those fantasies are big drivers of a lot of our politics.

You’re right that in the thirties, there were people on the left who were pro-Soviet, pro-Stalinist. But you also know that a huge part of the left was anti-Stalinist.

O.K., that left that was pro-Stalinist was in my field until recently. They were the dominant trend in part of my field that I’ve been in for forty years. The right today also has people who are anti-Putin, I need to add.

Do you not share the view—and it’s my view—that if taken to its logical or worst extent, that the events in the White House last week could constitute a moral and strategic U-turn for the United States, which would be a disaster?

Presidents rarely turn a ship as big as the United States during a four-year term. Let’s remember the seventies, when Nixon was President and U.S. soft power was at a very low ebb, really in the toilet. We lost the Vietnam war. Nixon resigned over Watergate. The oil shock destroyed the Rust Belt. It was so bad that disco was popular. The seventies were really bad. And then what happened? America came back and had some of its best decades. So, it’s recuperable. Now, again, I’m not validating anything here, but Trump has revealed some truths about American power and America’s place in the world, and the European place in the world here, that are valuable truths. And he did it in his Trumpian fashion.

What are those truths?

So the truths are as follows: Zelensky is looking for security guarantees, which means that not just Ukrainians will die—that people from other countries, European countries especially, will die. The Europeans have not sent a single soldier to the front during the war, and they’re fighting over whether they’re going to send any soldiers, even if there’s a peace deal, an armistice. Poland, which is Ukraine’s biggest backer, has refused to agree to promise to send peacekeepers after the fighting stops, let alone during the fighting. So Europe, God bless, is playing charades. Trump, for all his Trumpy qualities, and we all know what they are—there’s no need to reiterate them, and I’m sure your magazine is full tilt in going after them—has nonetheless shown that it’s put up or shut up on the European side. And even though Putin couldn’t get the Europeans to get their act together, maybe Trump will.

Now, would I have done it Trump’s way? Do I appreciate that Trump is hurting American soft power? Yes, I get all of that, but I’m in the world that I’m in. I have the President that I have and I have the Europe that I have. And Europe just had a meeting where the principal public comment was that maybe they would get an armistice for a month, but it wouldn’t be an armistice on the battlefield. And nobody would send troops. I mean, what is this charade that we’re talking about? Trump exposed this. Now what are we going to do about it—first and foremost, as Europeans?

Now, that’s not to say that Trump is going to solve anything. It could well be that Trump’s actions produce the perverse and unintended consequences that we often see in politics. It could be that the situation worsens. But the situation was not going well. The Biden policy had dead-ended long before Biden left office. Something needed to be done. The trajectory we were on was failing. And let’s get on a trajectory that’s succeeding.

You’ve written and talked extensively about the dimensions and resiliency of American power since as early as 1880. When you hear people, including me, say that the encounter between Trump and Zelensky and the White House could really take us to a horrible place, do you think that’s alarmist?

Yes. I mean, you know American history. You know the Presidency of Andrew Jackson. You know that we had the Civil War. America has been berserk for as long as—Philip Roth: “the indigenous American berserk.” Now we have social media, and it’s more visible than it was before. Not only is it surfaced but it’s encouraged because it’s the business model, right? Extremism, outrage, performance—all of this is now how you make money, not just how you show your resentment and your outrage.

America is a place that—few people are willing to admit—is the most powerful country ever in recorded history across all dimensions: hard power, economic power, innovation power, energy superpower, soft power, alliance power. We could go on. There’s never been a power in world history on this level. The U.S. is five per cent of the global population and twenty-five per cent of global G.D.P. since 1880, more or less. That wasn’t caused by government—it wasn’t caused by Presidents. It can’t be suppressed and strangled by Presidents, no matter what they do, and they do a lot of things that I think are detrimental to American standing in the world.

And so the question for us is, going forward, how much of this American power is going to be used effectively, competently, as the world is changing, and how much can America rely on others? Because, let’s be honest, European power has declined, Japanese power has declined. It’s not American power that’s declining. It’s our alliances, our allies, who are declining. Our adversaries are not necessarily declining. We can argue about Russia, how deep its decline might be, but in the case of China, we clearly have a peer adversary.

And so what’s the plan? There’s unlimited demand for American power. Hey, let’s bring Ukraine into NATO! Hey, let’s do a security treaty with the Saudis! Everybody wants more and more American power, but American power can’t fulfill all its current commitments, let alone make new ones. You remember when our strategic doctrine was to [have the ability to] fight two major wars in two major theatres simultaneously. Then Obama comes to office, and he reduces that to 1.5 major wars in major theatres. Have you ever seen half a major war? I haven’t.

Then Trump comes along, and he reduces it to one major war and one major theatre. So we have alliance commitments—obligations to allies—in at least three major theatres. Our strategic doctrine is we can do one at any one time. Trump is revealing, and in some cases accelerating, a process, where America’s commitments exceed our capabilities, not because we’re in decline but because the alliances that we’re in—those countries, Germany, Japan, and a few others—are not punching at their weight. You can say that Trump is wrong in his analysis of the world. You can say that Trump’s methods are abominable. But you can’t say that American power is sufficient to meet its current commitments on the trajectory that we’re on—and we didn’t even get to the fiscal situation.

How is Vladimir Putin reading this situation? How is he watching Washington, and what does he want?

Russian grand strategy for, I don’t know, three centuries has been the following: West decline! Have the West implode and collapse, and then we’ll survive. That’s Russian grand strategy. Things are bad in Russia. They’re horrible in Russia, but, hey, if the West implodes—if the West defeats itself, if the West is undermining its own policies and strengths—then Russia will be O.K. This is your fear. This is what you’re talking about: that Trump is doing Putin’s work for him.

My argument is that that might be true, but I wouldn’t trade U.S. power for Russian power in any dimension. And I wouldn’t necessarily trade our political system for their political system, because the voters punished the Democrats in the previous election, big time, and they’re going to punish anybody else who’s incompetent, fails to deliver, and wrecks either our institutions, our economy, inflation, the stock market. Americans hate war, and they hate losing war even more than they hate war. So Trump is playing with fire here.

You not only follow the statements and thinking of the Russian leadership but you’re reading everyday sources, like Signal, in Russian. What does that tell you?

That they’re hoping that this abominable war ends.

Who is “they,” Steve—

The Russian population. So let’s remember: since the fall of 2022, when the Russians were evicted from Kharkiv, it was really just riot police that were chased out of Kharkiv province. It was not some combined arms operation that the Ukrainians beat—but nonetheless it was successful and impressive. Since then, Russia has controlled nineteen per cent, roughly, of Ukrainian territory, more or less. That’s more than two years. They’ve lost seven hundred thousand people [dead and wounded], gaining nothing in those two-plus years.

Now, you ask yourself: How sustainable is that over the really long term? And the answer is, Putin keeps throwing lives into the meat grinder—now it’s North Korean lives—because the Ukrainians have fewer lives to throw up against him. Ukraine doesn’t need Abrams tanks. They got them and they didn’t help. It doesn’t need F-16 planes because they can’t fight in the battlefield against Russian anti-aircraft. Ukraine needs five hundred thousand eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, and nobody’s sending them. But again, Russia needs the same thing. They need either to get Ukraine to capitulate, which it’s refused to do, remarkably, or they need to get others to force Ukraine to capitulate, which I don’t think anybody can do. So Russia’s in this holding action. Putin is willing to go as long as it takes, but Russian society—maybe not.

Then how does this end?

Who thinks it’s going to end? It started under Catherine the Great, when, in 1783, she conquered Crimea. We’re in the middle of a longer-term trajectory here. People think this is going to end: Ukraine can take some territory back, and Russia’s going to capitulate. They’re going to win on the battlefield. The primary problem of this from the beginning has been the idea that Ukraine was going to win this on the battlefield, rather than somehow apply the kind of political pressure to force an armistice that was favorable to Ukraine, meaning they could retain the sovereignty that they defended when they defended their capital, Kyiv, and they could invest in reconstruction and attempt the kind of South Korean trajectory from the armistice in the Korean War. That’s been the play from the beginning. It’s still the play now. You and I have been talking about this for three years now.

In other words, the outcome that’s possible, and that ends the meat grinder, is like a divided Korea: a divided Ukraine.

That’s the good outcome. The bad outcome is Ukraine loses its sovereignty; it recognizes Russian annexations of the territory that Russia controls and even beyond the territory Russia currently controls; it’s forced to put limits on the size of its military so it’s defenseless; it cannot join an international security alliance or form any security alliance whatsoever. Those limits on Ukrainian sovereignty amount to capitulation. That’s not peace; that’s peace-on-the-knees, right? That’s what Putin is now “willing to negotiate.” He was not willing to negotiate a peace in which Russia kept control over Ukrainian territories but nobody recognized them as Russian. Ukraine put no limits on its military so it could defend itself if fighting resumed, and Ukraine could join any organization that was willing to take them and that they were qualified for, whether currently existing or future existing. That’s the favorable armistice that we’ve been hoping enough political pressure on Putin would deliver. We are nowhere near that right now. We should have been working toward that for years now, and we haven’t been.

What is the nature of the political pressure that you clearly think the Biden Administration failed to administer, and what would it be now?

We put very significant pressure on the battlefield, including allowing long-range strikes onto Russian territory, not just defense of Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. We escalated in the economic sphere with very significant sanctions. Maybe we could do more. But nonetheless, we’ve done a lot there. It’s in the political sphere that we’ve failed to apply significant pressure. Putin suffered a debacle in Syria. Who did that? The Israelis and the Turks did. So that was available the whole time, the debacle in Syria. There are many other vulnerabilities, including in Africa, where Russian interests could have been rolled back, with a little of this and a little of that.

More importantly, the story is always this: authoritarian regimes can fail at everything, and they often do, but they survive as long as they succeed at one thing: the suppression of political alternatives. If political alternatives—viable political alternatives—appear, either on the domestic scene, in the media space that’s infiltrated, or in exile, the regimes can get destabilized, because a lot of people would like to see a different future for Russia. But they don’t have that on the horizon, and it’s too risky to step out for nothing.

My understanding of political alternatives in Russia are the following. You have on one hand, the kind of dissidents—pro-democratic dissidents—who were embodied by Alexei Navalny. We know that story. And we have to admit how limited that is. It is small in number, and the willingness of the regime to crush it knows no end. There’s a different kind of dissent or alternative in Russia that’s harder for Americans to see. These are not democrats—these are not Navalny-ites. They’re quite different, but maybe more in number. Talk about that a little bit and what role they might play. I think it is axiomatic, and not just in Russia, that these kinds of regimes do not survive full-scale political alternatives. When they open themselves up to do so, as we saw in the late eighties, it’s not a happy end.

Yeah, you’re right. I mean, again, we’ve been talking about this for what, three years now?

Or thirty.

Yes. So Navalny: unbelievably impressive. The charisma, yes, but also the organizational skills; figuring out how to win elections, where they were contestable, was phenomenal and it needed to be protected. Now, Navalny’s courage and stubbornness made him go back to Russia rather than, in his mind, be irrelevant in exile. That would not have been the path that I would’ve taken, but he took it and he’s his own man, and we have the results from that. His courage and skill: impressive for all time.

But you also have a lot of people who are part of the regime, who don’t care about Ukraine, but who are hurting for Russia. They think Russia’s on a failed trajectory; that the gap between Russia and the West is widening, not narrowing, over this war; that Russia has mortgaged its future; that Russia’s militarized economy is not sustainable; that the banking system is basically a fiction now because they’ve made massive loans to the military-industrial complex that are never going to be paid back. There is almost no investment in the civilian economy. China has taken whatever market share in the Russian domestic market it’s wanted. And so Russia is on a failed trajectory for Russia’s own nationalist interests.

And so [they think]: let’s end the war in Ukraine and have a rapprochement with Europe. Russia has never been prosperous without a deep and multilayered relationship with Europe. Let’s do that not because we love Ukraine but because we love Russia. Those people are kind of what we call internal defectors. They make up a significant part of the security and military establishment, but they’re not going to go out on a limb in a situation where there’s nothing on offer. There’s no sanctions relief on offer to them. There’s no exile—a protected exile, government in exile—offered to them. Nothing’s on offer to them except support for Putin or a bullet in the neck.

How do we reach such people, and who are they?

So, the K.G.B. brought [Mikhail] Gorbachev to power. You think Gorbachev got to power himself? He was an apparatchik in Stavropol province, and [Yuri] Andropov contrived his promotion to Moscow, even though agriculture in Stavropol province had not necessarily been on the highest level. Gorbachev was inserted into the leadership because the K.G.B. was worried about the trajectory of the Soviet Union, and the widening gap in capabilities with the U.S. and others. They needed to retrench. They needed to step back. They needed to reduce their vulnerabilities, their overcommitments. They were overstretched. These are the hard men of the regime who did this. And so these people exist.

Now, you’re going to tell me that they’re hard to find. Well, we recruit them to be information suppliers to us. The C.I.A. uses Telegram to recruit them right now. I don’t know how many there are and what their names are because I don’t have any security clearance.

But hey, if we can recruit them to supply the same information to the C.I.A. that I read on the Telegram and Signal channels every morning, maybe we can recruit them to form some type of pressure group, fly them to Warsaw, fly them to Helsinki, link them up with each other, figure out how to build political pressure against the Putin regime to show that there are alternatives—which are Russian nationalist, patriotic alternatives—to rescue the country from its current trajectory. Now, even if it doesn’t work, it puts the pressure on the regime to come to the table, and say, I’m going to preserve the regime over continuing the self-defeating war.

But wait a minute. Some would say: Steve, let’s get back to real life here. Real life is that Donald Trump is the President of the United States, and his affections are almost personal toward Vladimir Putin. When he speaks of Russia, he doesn’t speak in the complexities that you’ve mapped out. He likes the guy, he has an affinity for the guy. He feels much closer to him than not only Volodymyr Zelensky but, conceivably, the leaders of Western European nations.

Trump plays good cop with all your strongmen and faux strongmen, and he then has his staff play bad cop with them; and he plays bad cop with all of our allies, our treaty allies, and he has his staff play good cop with them.

That seems like an awfully optimistic reading of Trump’s strategic wiles.

Again, Trump: this is World Wrestling Entertainment. This is television. DOGE is “The Apprentice,” with Musk sitting in temporarily for Trump, firing people. “You’re fired!” This is a version of government that’s news-cycle-driven, that’s attention-driven, that’s Trump-centric. That’s the reality that you have, some of which is sincere and some of it is reversible, even in sometimes the same news cycle. You work with that—that’s what you have.

Now, again, Trump was elected in our system, rightly or wrongly. There isn’t a mirror on the planet big enough for the Democrats and the left to look into, to see all the ways that they elected Trump. No mirror is big enough for them. But now this is what we have. And so there are people in the Trump Administration who are highly qualified on the national-security side and who understand these issues at least as well, maybe better, than I do.

But again, we have this larger problem, where there’s not enough American power in the world, and hard choices have to be made—not because America’s in decline but because, forty years ago, thirty years ago, the G-7 was seventy per cent of the global economy, and now it’s much less. Again, that was the plan. The plan was for the rest of the world to rise up in the American-led order, and it worked. And now we’re not ready for that success.

You mentioned in passing what I think is a big theme of yours, and that is whether or not the United States is in decline. It’s been axiomatic from time to time, for decades now, that the United States is in decline, and that somebody else—most recently, China—is the ascendant power. I want to ask about that, and I also want to ask about how China is watching the U.S.-Ukraine-Russia drama.

Yes. So China’s a really impressive country. It’s a whole civilization. Unbelievably impressive, what they’ve done. Now, they went into the tank, around 1800, for a hundred and seventy years. That happens to coincide with the rise of America to superpower status. So the world before 1800 was a China-centric world. They were probably the largest economy, along with India, and they certainly viewed themselves as the center of the universe, and they had good reason to. The Europeans butt in: the British took over India; nobody ever managed to take over China, but China got roughed up by the imperialists. The U.S. rose in that world, until China started to come out of the tank in the late nineteen-seventies, but especially in the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands.

Now, for the first time in recorded history, China and the U.S. are powerful at the same time. For millennia, when China was the most powerful country, the U.S. didn’t exist. And when the U.S. was founded, thirteen colonies on the Eastern Seaboard—fledgling colonies of England—and three million people in the eighteenth century, China was three hundred million people and had the largest economy in the world.

And so now you look and see that there’s this U.S.-dominated world order, and China is now China again, but for the first time China in the U.S.-dominated world order. Now, China’s not going to like that, and they’re going to behave in such a way to push against that to shape the world order—not for U.S. interests, where China’s a junior partner, but for China’s interests. This is not exactly a shock, is it? It was shocking to many people that the U.S. facilitated China’s rise as fast as it happened. So the irony for China is now they want to push the U.S.-led order first out of East Asia, and then we’ll see—the appetite grows in the eating—but that’s been the basis of their success, of coming out of the tunnel. If the Chinese lose the U.S.-led order . . . be careful what you wish for. What is their pathway forward for continued prosperity, and who supplies the global commons? Who defends the global commons on which everyone’s prosperity, world trade, and security depend?

So that’s the world we’re in now, and they’re looking at Trump and they have no idea what’s coming next. Oh, my God, does he mean it? Is he sincere? Is it just bad cop with the good cop, and we can talk to the good cops? They don’t know; they’re off balance because of Trump. Remember, Putin thought Trump was going to deliver everything to Russia in his first term, and Trump was much harder on Russia than Obama was. So you tell me that you can predict what’s going to happen, Trump vis-à-vis China, and I’ll crown you king of the world.

Following our behavior with Ukraine last week, and not only last week, what signals does that send to China? And how might China proceed with Taiwan?

China has been strangling Taiwan for years and years now: information warfare; rehearsing a massive quarantine or blockade of Taiwan, even as we speak; cutting the cables around Taiwan to—there are only fourteen cables that connect Taiwan to the global network, and they can be cut, and then you’re left with Musk and Starlink, aren’t you? So this is under way already. It was under way during Obama’s Administration when they built the military bases on the coral reefs in the South China Sea, and Obama shrugged. And it was under way during Trump’s first term, and it was under way under Biden, and it’s under way again. And so it’s not as if it’s just started or it’s not as if there’s been a revelation recently.

China’s decision-making is in one man. It’s one person making a hundred-trillion-dollar decision. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s impossible to predict. It’s very hard to deter if you don’t know the inside of the Chinese system. It’s as opaque as any system has ever been. [Xi Jinping] is an opaque leader who doesn’t reveal himself, doesn’t do small talk. We don’t really have an answer for it. And by the way, when we asked our European allies: if there were a conflict in the Indo-Pacific involving the U.S. and China, would they come to our aid? Their answer was maybe, maybe not. That was under Biden, Mr. Transatlanticist. And so the Europeans are not all in with us over Taiwan or the Indo-Pacific, but, hey, we have to be all in with the Europeans over Ukraine or over other vulnerable areas. And so we’re in this situation again where war is catastrophic, and Xi Jinping is making the decision, and I have no idea his thought processes, and I don’t think anybody else does have an idea, even inside the Chinese system.

I don’t quite understand why Xi Jinping, in the current circumstances, would not make a move on Taiwan. It’s not entirely clear that the United States would rush to defend Lithuania or Estonia or Poland, NATO countries. Why would it intervene with Taiwan, which is so many thousands of miles more away?

Because Xi Jinping knows more about the People’s Liberation Army than you do. The P.L.A. is corrupt top to bottom, inside out, left to right, right to left. Is it a reliable instrument? When you roll “the iron dice,” as Bismarck called them, and you launch a war, you’d better be sure that you can win, because otherwise, your regime might fall. He’d be rolling the iron dice with the fate of the Communist regime in China. Everybody says he wants to go into the history books as the man who unified China, took back Hong Kong and took back Taiwan, mastered the South China Sea. But how about going into the history books as the guy who rolled the iron dice and lost the Chinese Communist regime the way Gorbachev peacefully lost the Soviet Union and the Communist regime?

So you’re talking about the ultimate risk. It’s existential. And his info on the P.L.A. is pretty substantial. He’s the chairman of the military commission in addition to being the President and the General Secretary of the Party. And I’ve got to tell you, a lot of people have been getting fired for corruption, including people he recently appointed. And so how certain is he of success? Which is why many analysts—and I sign on to their analysis—are more worried about quarantine than they are worried about amphibious attack across the strait. The Taiwan Strait theatre is the same size as the Mediterranean. Let’s remember that Hitler couldn’t cross the Channel.

So this is the hardest military operation to do, with a military that he might not be fully confident in, with risks that include the loss of his regime. So the more we can focus on their vulnerabilities and talk about the existential risk to that regime, the more we can enhance deterrence. Deterrence is not just Tomahawk missiles in Japan. It’s the political dimension: the regime has to be afraid for its existence, and then maybe it won’t do the kinds of things that put its existence at risk.

A final question. As a historian, you look at the United States through the lens of institutions, its past, its resilience, and not through the lens of the World Wide Wrestling Federation. Fair enough. But in the real world, that we’re living in, you have a government leadership that is now led by not only Donald Trump, who has his own character, but Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and on and on. Does your confidence in the stability and the resilience of the system survive that kind of leadership?

Well, we’ll live to see the answer to that. That’s an empirical question. You’re asking me to speculate on the future, but I believe we’ll live to see that.

We’ll live to see its endurance?

We’ll live to see the answer to your question.

Ah, not so optimistic. I see.

My view is pretty clear. The society is unbelievably strong, resilient, and dynamic. It’s incredible what you can get with American society—that’s not going away. Yes, there are issues like opioid overdose, fentanyl. There’s many, many issues that we can talk about. You know them all. You talk about them with your other guests. And those are all worrisome, and some of them are deeply worrisome. Nonetheless, over all, American society is really impressive. American institutions are phenomenal, and they’ve lasted a really long time. Of course, there are a lot of shortcomings. There are a lot of times we don’t live up to our promises. There are a lot of times that there’s violence in the streets, and much worse, in the past.

But my point being: we’ve been through a lot before. We need to remember that. That’s not necessarily an excuse for incompetence, violation of the law, or anything else. But we have this inbuilt radicalism now, where you win an election by ten thousand votes in some state called a swing state. You get a fifty-fifty Senate or close to it, and you decide to reinvent the American system, whether you’re going to do a Green New Deal, or whatever. And then the other side wins, also by the skin of its teeth, and it comes in and it decides it’s going to reinvent America again, because otherwise we’ll “lose our country.” Then a couple of years pass, and the American people punish the hell out of them—for their failures, for their incompetence, and just for their ideological excesses.

We have the berserk—that’s just inherent in who we are as a nation and a people—but we also have a middle ground where common sense prevails, where coalitions are necessary, where legislation passes not with fifty-one votes but with seventy votes, or not with two hundred and nineteen votes but with three hundred or four hundred votes. That’s happened in the past; therefore, it’s possible to get there. Again, it’s not going to be easy and simple, because the media environment has been radicalized. We went through this when radio was invented: people thought it was the end of civilization because they could just broadcast anything into people’s living rooms and nobody could stop them. But we mastered radio as an open society; we got Roosevelt. The same thing happened with TV, which was even worse because it was not just voice but images. And it was the end of civilization because you could show anybody and you could deceive and it wasn’t the truth and nobody could stop them. And we got Kennedy, and then Reagan.

Now we have social media, which is much more radical and disruptive, because everybody is a publisher now. Everybody has a megaphone now. It’s been massively destabilizing, and we’re worried that the authoritarians are gaining the upper hand, just like it happened with Mussolini and Goebbels in radio; just like it happened with television. And it turned out that we mastered and assimilated those as a free society, and now we have to do the same with social media. It first produced Obama, and then it produced Trump. So that’s the reality we’re in now.

How do we keep a free society while assimilating this massively disruptive technology? I don’t know the answer to that, but I believe that in the short run, we’re all dead. China attacks, Russia attacks, Iran gets the bomb. But, in the long run, we’re good. Because we have the better system, we have corrective mechanisms, we have a free and open society, we’ve got a judiciary that still works, and we can do this because we’ve done it before. And we’ve come from the depths. The Civil War! Andrew Jackson! There’s a lot in American history that is not necessarily optimistic for the future, and yet we made it through to the other side, and it’s quite possible we’ll make it through the current epoch that we’re in. And certainly I wouldn’t bet on the authoritarians in the long run, even if the short run can be very messy and maybe worse than messy. ♦

The original idea was an assignation. On a dreary Wednesday in September, 1960, John Updike, “falling in love, away from marriage,” took a taxi to see his paramour. But, he later wrote, she didn’t answer his knock, and so he went to a ballgame at Fenway Park for his last chance to see the Red Sox outfielder Ted Williams, who was about to retire. For a few dollars, he got a seat behind third base.

He spent the following five days writing about what happened next: Williams, after enduring a sorry little ceremony to say goodbye, came to bat for the last time, in the bottom of the eighth inning, and hit a home run—low, linear, perfect. “It was in the books while it was still in the sky,” Updike wrote, and it is still in the sky, sixty-five years later, because of the arresting vividness of his depiction. Updike captured not only the ball’s trajectory and its monumental effect but also the moment’s mix of jubilation and relief.

No one should have anticipated what Williams had done. He was forty-two; the Red Sox were bad; the air was heavy with impending rain; and the sky was so dark that the stadium lights had to be turned on—“always a wan sight in the daytime, like the burning headlights of a funeral procession.” But it was Updike’s insight to see that everyone had expected it, and in fact it was that shared expectation that held them in their seats. “There will always lurk,” he wrote, “around a corner in a pocket of our knowledge of the odds, an indefensible hope, and this was one of the times, which you now and then find in sports, when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future.”

The essay, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” ran in The New Yorker a few weeks later—white-hot speed by the publication’s stately standards. Its editor, William Shawn, wrote to Updike that it was the best piece about baseball the magazine had ever printed, which, Updike later allowed, was small praise, for among the “many prejudices” of the previous editor, Harold Ross, “was one against baseball,” and there had been few mentions of the sport in The New Yorker. Shawn’s judgment has not quite stood up over time. Two years after “Hub Fans” appeared, Roger Angell began covering baseball for the magazine, which he did so often and so well that he ended up in Cooperstown. Still, the original appraisal is pretty close to true. Angell, for his part, was always clear about his debt to Updike, and he was not alone. So much of the best sportswriting since then bears the hallmarks of Updike’s example: an elegant, natural tone; precise, surprising descriptions; pacing that neither impedes the drama nor does too much to drive it. His style and references can seem a little pretentious now. (A groundskeeper picks baseballs off the top of a wall “like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective.”) But Updike demonstrated that you could write about sports without a suspicious or cloying bent, or the access of a beat writer. He wrote, as he later put it, with the heart of a fan.

Updike never scratched an itch without putting it into a book, so it’s not a surprise that that trip to Fenway turned into an essay. Updike and Williams shared more than a little—an outsider’s perspective on Boston; a tall, lean physique; eyes that could drill a hole through the soul—but Williams, unlike so many of Updike’s fictional projections, also shared his genius. Williams’s talent was hitting a ball with a stick, whereas Updike’s was turning the world into crystalline prose. Yet they both carried something essential, “the hard blue glow of high purpose.”

Williams was the best pure hitter of his generation, maybe ever, but what fascinated Updike was his dedication to his craft. “For me, Williams is the classic ballplayer of the game on a hot August weekday, before a small crowd, when the only thing at stake is the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill,” Updike wrote. He saw Williams as a “loner,” and that batting, like writing, was a lonely, unforgiving art. What separated the good from the great, more than talent, was the quality and intensity of their care. Williams’s seemed to carry the ball out of the park, Updike observed. He knew what he was talking about. ♦

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu

Ted Williams’s last game at Fenway Park.